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JPR Live Session: OK Go

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With a career that includes award-winning videos, New York Times op-eds, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire (Paracadute), collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, and an experiment that encoded their music on actual strands of DNA, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved.

Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of transformation. Released in the fall 2014 via their own Paracadute/BMG, Hungry Ghosts is the band's fourth full-length and the newest addition to a curriculum vitae filled with experimentation in a variety of mediums.

Drawn from the same marching orders issued to big-hearted happiness creators as Queen, T. Rex, The Cars or Cheap Trick, and a lifetime of mixed tapes exchanged by lifelong music fans, Hungry Ghosts is a reaffirmation of the sounds and ideas that brought the band together in the first place. Building on (and deconstructing) 15 years of pop-rock smarts, musical friendship, and band-of-the-future innovations, Hungry Ghosts offers melancholic fireworks, basement funk parties, IMAX-sized choruses, and space-age dance floor bangers.

To accompany the music of Hungry Ghosts, OK Go has released a selection of imaginative new videos, including a mind-bending journey through an optical illusion filled warehouse, an elaborately choreographed dance performed on Honda's UNI-CUB personal mobility devices, and a stunning display of zero gravity acrobatics in moving aircraft. Their latest video for "The One Moment" captures 325 events in literally one moment (4.2 seconds).

OK Go has been honored with a GRAMMY Award, three MTV Video Music Awards (one of them from Japan!), a CLIO, three UK Music Video Awards, two WEBBY Awards (including one for their collaboration with The Muppets and Sesame Street), a spot in a Guggenheim installation, a total of 10 Cannes Lions, and a Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in the Visual Arts.​

*Due to some last minute rehearsal restraints for the band, this session ended up as a 1-on-1 with OK Go lead vocalist and singer Damien Kulash.

As FM Network Program Director and Music Director, Eric oversees many aspects of JPR's broadcast day. He still hosts the occasional Open Air or classical music shift, and is the driving force behind JPR Live Sessions - our popular series of live in-studio music performances and conversations.